3 crowns

Welles the Optimist

(from The Poetics of Cinema)

Orson Welles used to ask, "Why work so hard, if only to fabricate others' dreams?" He was an optimist and believed that the industry could dream.  Accepting his postulate would mean confusing dreams with calculated, profit-hungry mythomania. Let's be much more optimistic: even if the industry perfects itself (in its tendencies toward control), it will never be able to take over the space of uncertainty and polysemia that is essential to images - the possibility of transmitting a private world in a present time that is host to multiple pasts and futures.

Future

Been in the planning phases of two video works for the last couple of weeks.

One will be a sort of avant-garde doc or contemplation on Brenez and her current work on what she has termed Internationalist Cinema. Inspired by reading about this with Brenez's recent visit to NYC. It's not going to be a feature length of any means, just almost an explanatory, visually experimental video about these filmmakers, Brenez and Internationalist Cinema. I have vague ideas and images in my head, yet nothing as concrete as the next one.

Inspired after reading "Images of Images" chapter in Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema. Particularly the digression Ruiz gets into about an imagined utilitarian society that only allows one painting to be painted by all painters and the outcome of three very different painters there. The whole chapter is trying to prove how a copy can be just as interesting, original, different, artistic, etc than the real thing. I have a very specific idea about a segment of this film and it will be someone positioned among different monitors and cameras where at the same time you can see different angles of the same action on screen. More ideas but don't want to give away too much.

Hopefully I will get some time and be able to start working on these. Will be updating as things progress.

http://strugglingon2fronts.com

ps: two completely unrelated but incredible David Cronenberg posts through Criterion:

An incredible 1.5 hour interview with the man himself at the Museum of the Moving Image (sound)

Notes from A Videodrome test screening (images)

Cinema vs Video & Audience Perception

"There is a superstition - or belief, or scientific truth supported by experiment - which says that cinema is the art of stimulating a part of the brain that normally functions during sleep, by bombarding it with static images juxtaposed so as to create the illusion of movement. Video, on the other hand, in which the image is liquid, is said to stimulate another part of the brain which functions only while the body is awake. Whether the distinction is scientifically valid or not is irrelevant here. What is interesting is the suggestion that we can intervene to provoke virtual images by using the brain's compensatory mechanisms. A group of people who are involved in manufacturing special effects for the Lucas company in Hollywood discussed with me the possibility of making "personalized" animated films exclusively out of such images. The principal obstacle is that the brain needs twenty or thirty seconds to process the first image, but once the first image is reconstituted the others can run off in animated series using the same basic pattern. We went further, though, and from these flux-images we imaged film sequences in which abstract animated images would provoke different responses in each one of us."

excerpt from Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema